To End an Affair
by MouseyL
Summary: Summary It is night, and it must end. "It has always surprised him how easy it is to cheat."


He feels like it's the last night of his life as he takes each deep breath. Lying on death row, waiting for a decision to be made, he can hear air drifting through the window and stroking the curtain as it flickers inwards. Life as he knows it is about to end. A single season for twelve short years, so many seconds and so few days, and now the leaves change. A dog barks in the night, breaking the spell of midnight, and he closes his eyes to the numbers of the clock counting down. The inside of his eyelids stare back at him.

It has always surprised him how simple it is to cheat. Not the practical issues: time, place and excuses he sees every day at work anyway. It's the complex emotions that shocked him, how easily he contained them within himself. There was comfort to be found in the hidden places of his heart, of unspoken words and silent feelings carried frozen inside. Cobwebs hang, dusty in protection. Now comes the thaw, the start of this, and in the dark he senses the stinging needles pierce as feelings grow and seep out through him.

Her breaths match his heartbeat, and he knows she is asleep. He's used to that knowledge, to hearing the catch in her throat as she wakes and the atmosphere change from the simple peace of solitude into something different. To feel the shift of her weight as she rolls over and lets her fingers touch his arm, butterfly wings across his skin.

He's let it go for too long already, and yet it will never be long enough. Each year is a second, another breath, and every exhale pushes him further off the edge. He's close now, to jumping or falling, to letting the air caress and catch him for long, breathless moments in time before he hits wherever it is he is supposed to end up. A new world.

It's not going to be easy, though. To give up. He cannot imagine a future. Without one taste in one moment and then the change: texture and colour and smell transforming. The times they they mix, in the squad room when Kathy invades or his house when Olivia does and he breathes both together for perfect, broken minutes before one drifts away.

She is cut grass, smelling of summer sun on a Sunday afternoon as the children dance and play around him. She is home-cooked food, evenings at the dinner table as warmth surrounds them, white clouds with black streaks of an exhausting day. She is the keeping back of truth, the holding onto the darkest secrets of the world and watching their children sleep. He shields her.

She is stale coffee with a hint of sugar in the dark of night, as rain stains the blood surrounding a body and seeps through to their tired skins. She is a scotch in a shadowy bar, a guilty sentence and a sense of hopelessness despite that, as they pause the hours until it begins again. She is the truth, mirrored in her eyes as they hear the stuttered words of a child describing the pain of the world, no need for touch or comfort.

He's not sure how he will live, but now is not fair, to them or the kids or to him. To always love half a man, to watch as his eyes glaze despite your words, as he thinks of regret or love, of secrets and betrayal. He cannot do that any more.

A voice echoes through the doorway, ajar in order to hear his children. Someone is dreaming and he tenses, ready to act, to wake, to protect. But nothing more comes, they settle back into sleep and his muscles slowly let go.

His thoughts dance through the past, pausing on moments. A plus sign on a white stick, a black gun held to a head. A scream of labour, begging his name, pleading to make it end. A cry of fear at the thought of losing him. The sound of their heartbeats as he holds them. Their laughter in different chimes ringing through his ears.

Her blue eyes offer him their child, he holds the tiny life in his arms, and with one stroke of brand new skin, his heart is stolen. Her brown eyes offer understanding deep within them and he drowns in her, forgetting his pain as it intertwines with hers. They can no longer tell whose is whose, only that in being together, in each other's company, it is bearable.

He has loved them for years. He has cheated on both in his way, never the physical but the emotional, lying in bed with one as he dreams of the other. He has given one his body, his life, his vows, and the other his soul. Both he has offered his heart, never his to give as a whole.

He's ripped himself apart for too long. He thought his heart would throb, scream, deafen him with pain at the loss but it hasn't. Quietly beating, it is curled and contented within, sleeping away its grief. There is no doubt the agony will come, but these times have to be better, easier, lighter than a shadow covering him always.

Gazing down, the drop looks easy, endless, the bottom unseen and unknown. To jump, to let go, will be the easiest thing he will ever do. His muscles will relax, he will take one last breath, and it will be done, and the air will catch him.

The clock turns over empty minutes as the world sleeps. He knows somewhere out there, in the darkness and the silent, in quiet breaths and screams, in the shout of joy and the cry of anguish, there are lives being born and broken, last gasps and first wails, the sob of a man as he holds his wife's body, and hers as he walks out of the door.

The choice comes tomorrow, and he knows what it will be.


End file.
